Dirty jobs

The age of prequels is upon us. In film, fashion and publishing, revivals rule and, often, mimicry. When talent flags, bring on the remnants and the remakes.

That’s not the case with the reissue of Charles McCarry’s “The Tears of Autumn,” a wonderful web of espionage first spun in 1975, close enough to President Kennedy’s assassination, on which the plot turns, to have reverberated in readers’ memories. Thirty years after the book’s publication, 42 after his murder, though, the initials JFK may more readily bring to mind a major airport. But McCarry’s spin looks as good as new.

So does Paul Christopher, the ruthless yet compassionate secret agent who moves in mysterious ways among Washington, Vietnam, the Vatican and a swarm of exotic locales.

He serves less his employer, the U.S. government, than the cause of Truth, about what really happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, about how the nation became entangled in Vietnam and about how the tangled webs we weave can turn into a live, sparking wire when we attempt to winkle out unwelcome truths.

“You think the truth will make men free,” Christopher’s best friend tells him. “But it only makes them angry.” There’s certainly a lot of anger and enough mendacity to produce lots of wrath. Our hero takes it all calmly.

As we follow Christopher on his velocious, mortiferous ventures, we learn a lot about spy craft; about Vietnamese family structure, pieties and hierarchies; still more about similarities between that era’s White House-centered politics, plots, coverups and rabid loyalties and those of the present day.

As it is gradually, slyly, relentlessly revealed, McCarry’s subtext becomes daunting. His cleverness was never in doubt.

The title of Michael Lawson’s thriller “The Inside Ring” refers to the tight crew of Secret Service agents who guard the president. It would seem, though, that the group has been penetrated.

In a spectacular Georgia river gorge, the president is wounded by a sniper while fishing; the friend who stood beside him and a Secret Service agent are dead. Soon, the presumed shooter is found dead. Has he committed suicide? Or has his death been made to look like suicide?

Those in the know, including the secretary of Homeland Security and the speaker of the House, have reason to feel uneasy. Speaker John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, a devious, cigar-chomping pol, sends his special investigator, Joe DeMarco, to ferret out some answers. DeMarco’s explorations take him around Washington’s repositories of privileged information and into Georgia too.

There, on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, and sometimes in it, he begins to unravel a skein of dirty, dangerous secrets. Deadly creatures with claws and fangs lurk in and around the swamp’s fetid waters. Mahoney’s troubleshooter finds plenty of trouble and plenty of hurt.

In the best tradition of cliffhangers, however, and with the help of his friend fellow investigator Emma, DeMarco begins to make sense of a very twisted plot. Little thanks to him and more to Emma, the equally twisty villains are finally brought to book. They have earned it.

“Premeditated Murder,” Ed Gaffney’s first novel, is full to the brim with thrills, spills and chills.

A covey of provincial judges is blackmailed and intimidated from doing its duty. A coven of young people is brutally mowed down by a large, angry black man wielding an illegally modified AK-47. A young Japanese American woman with journalistic ambitions is hounded by ill-intentioned police and FBI agents for no evident reason. A brave and decent man who unexpectedly becomes president of the United States uncovers a conspiracy of anti-terrorist terrorism.

The book’s many coverups, much foul play and titillating stunts make for a heady, densely populated tale that’s mostly about two Massachusetts criminal-lawyers- turned-detectives who are defending an indefensible case before an intractable judge.

A bit prolix, a bit spun out, intermittently politically correct, sometimes too sentimental, occasionally improbable but mostly galvanizing, this is electric, tingling fare.

Gaffney, until recently a practioner with the Massachusetts criminal bar, is married to romance and suspense novelist Suzanne Brockmann. It looks as if, quite soon, there will be two bestselling authors in the family.

In Sara Paretsky’s 1982 novel “Indemnity Only,” Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski was born, like the giant-killer goddess Athena, fully armed. But with “Fire Sale,” V.I.’s 12th appearance in print, age is beginning to show.

The Chicago private eye has always grappled with social problems more than with the malefactors she hunts down in the great hard-boiled detective tradition -- modified by feminism, tough but tender.

The resilience is still there, but softened, and she becomes more accident prone than ever. V.I., too kind for her own good, is a sucker for other people’s troubles; she neglects her paying clients to help teenagers foundering in problems of their own making and rancorous losers bleating for attention. She thinks they need her, when it is she who needs them to need her.

“Fire Sale” is a kinder, gentler, more long-winded variant of V.I.’s usual social interventionism, focused this time on a chain evocatively called Buy Smart. She confronts problems of immigrant labor, outsourcing, low-paid jobs and workers’ fears of losing them, ruthless bosses, gangbangers, Pentecostal worshipers and others with dreams of escape to a better life.

The book opens slowly, gathers speed as characters begin to act badly and goes on to demonstrate that, as Paretsky once wrote, the search for truth can be lonely. Of course it can. Only this time V.I. isn’t lonely. Having let herself be talked into coaching a South Chicago high school girls’ basketball team, she is inveigled into local industrial politics that turn first larcenous, then murderous.

All Paretsky’s plots are convoluted and this one has more whorls than a gastropod mollusk (conch to you); yet it comes out all right in the end, despite Warshawski’s distractions and a clientele whose naivete often borders on insanity. The sleuth’s too, sometimes.

But then, it’s hard to keep coming up with innovative cliches. *